Think Beyond the Obvious

Importance of Weak Ties in Strengthening your Social Network

Strong Ties: These include your close friends whom you know well and with whom you interact frequently.

Weak Ties: These are the acquaintances who know you superficially and your interactions with them are rare.

Between the two of them who should support you more in propagating your service? The intuitive answer is obviously the former, that is the strong ties. Let us look at a hypothetical scenario. You (A) have strong ties with B & C with whom your total strength of the network is 28 connections whereas with X & Y you have weak ties and the total network among you is 25 connections. Which one should give you more mileage? (refer figure below)

Let us look at it mathematically.

You will observe that in strong ties there are lot of common connections which lead to a great deal of overlap. Whereas in case of weak ties, the overlap is less and the distributed network is high.

You will observe that your message will spread to 7 new connections with strong ties whereas with 18 connections with weak ties.

Let us look with two examples:

My book, Contextual Selling was published a few years back. I had conducted a few sales training programs for Rittal India, a leading manufacturer of IT enclosures. When Jacob Chandy, the Vice president Sales and Marketing went through the book, he immediately ordered for 80 copies. In the last 5 years I might have met him hardly 3-4 times.

I was delivering a Keynote address for Metrology Division of Carl Zeiss in 2014. After seeing the book, Mr. Wolfgang Schwarz, VP Sales based in Germany ordered for 30 copies. Our interactions over mail and linkedin are hardly 3-4 in the last two years.

I suggested Sunil my good old friend (strong tie) who was in sales about the book. He said, “I need a complimentary copy.”

Last week I was conducting a program for Bruker Analytics in Mumbai. I had interacted with Dr. Shreeram Oak CEO, only once in 2012. After that meeting the second time I met him was while conducting the program.

In Mumbai I have two close friends, Amar and Ramesh (names changed) who are CEOs of companies in similar field and competing with Bruker. Both of them know me for the last 25 years. (We were working in the same company earlier ) Whenever we meet, they regularly complain about the poor quality of their salespeople and the need for a training program But training program to Rajan , no way!

Strong Ties:

They know you too well. ( familiarity breeds contempt?)

They move in almost similar circles

There is a considerable overlap in their networks.

Weak Ties:

They know you enough about your professional competence.

More novel information about you can move into this network.

There is a less overlap

The concept paper on Weak ties was developed by Mark Granovetter a Harvard Theoretician in 1972 as a part of his Ph. D. thesis. The Strength of Weak Ties is considered as a most influential sociological paper.

Quite often life is illogical and counterintuitive, do not ignore the weak ties,make the best use of them to improve the strength of your social network. Wish You a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year!